about soundcloud

Bandcamp is great but also very old-school music business, almost anti-internet, in some ways. It is more elegant than Soundcloud EXCEPT FOR (as previously noted) when you just want to put up a song here and a song there, where BC forces you to put them into ALBUMS/RELEASES which creates this weird formalization of something that you might just want to throw out there to share and get a reaction. I bet that Bandcamp's core artist base is generally older than that on SC, though that might just be stereotyping how young people consume music.

No way is SC clunkier than FB!

And I mean, it's devoted to music. You're not sorting through people's pictures of their kids, ads, political opinions, birthdays, ads, etc when you want to listen to the artists you follow.

soundcloud has your classic organic rhizome structure of social connections so it's browsable in a way the comparatively officious bandcamp isn't

also dj sets and podcasts and comments

soundcloud has great content. exclusive mixes, unreleased tracks, etc. if you don't find it useful, you probably just have shit taste. And the ui is fine.
Facebook is for losers and advertisers.

But I guess soundcloud is "garbage" because it doesn't charge for things. Eughhhhh..

Is there a way to find out what I listened to on soundcloud yesterday while not logged in? The player moves on to "related tracks" at the end of the track you listen to but they don't get added to browser history and there's no obvious history list on the site for non-logged-in users.

I heard a great track on a mix and went back to the mix I thought I was listening to and the great track isn't there any more so it must have come up after that mix finished, but the list of related tracks has changed too, as have the search results for my original search term, so neither of those is bringing up anything which looks right - mostly single tracks rather than mixes.

I guess some people pine for the old days of auditory "missed connections" in these days of listening to Spotify instead of radio and having the Shazam app in yr pocket at the supermarket etc but hey, seems I found a way to get one via new technology. I'll probably never know what it was except that it was approx 31 minutes into whatever I was listening to which wasn't what I thought I was listening to.

hurrah, found a soundcloud log file in sqlite format in Chrome's "local storage" folder, signed up for the soundcloud API and fed the track IDs in to get titles (possibly not an approved use of the API), was eventually reunited with the mix in question

you may laugh at me for being easily impressed now but the track was Philip Glass - The Geometry of Circles and I should probably have known what it was because I've seen the video before

a successful afternoon at work! (umm)

please continue talking about being recording artists who use soundcloud, sorry for my dorky interruption but this was #1 thread with soundcloud in title

What's going on at the moment?

Seeing lots of posts on FB and Twitter about people having their accounts closed (most of which were pro accounts hosting their own mixes and edits etc)

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/80456/20150831/soundcloud-sued-for-copyright-infringement.htm

and most of the tracks getting pulled are remixes or mixes that contain recordings owned by Sony, correct? i've also heard that there's a 'three strikes' policy as far as shutting down accounts that posted this flagged content (which is super dumb, since apparently it's retroactive and people have had this stuff up for years in some cases).

i know the backlash is real and some people are leaving soundcloud on principle, but i'm not ready to let go. most of what i post & listen to there is original music, not dj mixes or remixes, and i haven't had any issue with my mixes either.

Soundcloud is still good for me too, but i'm finding more things at Mixcloud these days. If Mixcloud would just fix their buggy app, I'd be happy there.

the problem with soundcloud is that they don't pay their PRS fees, which is pretty morally indefensible afaict

http://i57.tinypic.com/x3cw1i.jpg

I was just vibing on the artwork for this funky track when a full screen ad popped up. turn off automatic updating quick!

imho: if ur songs aren't for sale anywhere you should put an option to download... so frustrating when a song you like is trapped on the cloud. i know you can rip but the way i used to do it no longer works and now i have to look up a new way to do it? and what will happen when you take it down?

http://anything2mp3.com/ works for me

thx mate

Yeah but ripping it will only give you the song in 128 :(

tru

on soundcloud all roads lead to bad 'trap' music

128 > 0

also tru

http://mp3fiber.com lets you rip at 320. I use it a lot.

youtube-dl works for Soundcloud.

What's the bitrate of the soundcloud original?

It's 128 as far as I can tell (so ripping it at 320 doesn't mean shit if the original source is 128, what you get is just a worse version, just bigger)

(btw you don't need anything special for soundcloud, the developer tools in Firefox will tell you the URL of the mp3 file being played)

It's 128 as far as I can tell

so even if you upload a wav, it converts it to 128 for playback? never really thought about that.

i've ripped a few things by opening Audacity and recording a wav as it plays on SC, no idea if that's any better than these other methods.

"Please be aware that we transcode all tracks to 128 kbps mp3 for streaming playback. However when you make your track downloadable, this allows your listeners to download your track in the exact format that you uploaded, without any transcoding."

(Performers will often given permission to stream something but not to make it available for download btw.)

Well unless there's a premium version that streams WAV, yeah, I have only ever seen 128k mp3 (just like bandcamp, bands upload lossless but the streaming is only 128).

From their help page:

Please be aware that we transcode all tracks to 128 kbps mp3 for streaming playback. However when you make your track downloadable, this allows your listeners to download your track in the exact format that you uploaded, without any transcoding.

As for recording the stream, it can only be as good as the stream itself.

what he said

I can confirm that the downloads are at other than 128. I downloaded a hundred aphex twin tracks and the bitrate was all over the place.

Makes sense. I do like the ability to make tracks available for streaming but not dl, fwiw.

"As for recording the stream, it can only be as good as the stream itself.

― moans and feedback (Dinsdale), Monday, January 18, 2016 2:52 PM Bookmark Flag Post"

Not to mention, you know, the song.

Doomed?

http://www.factmag.com/2016/02/11/soundcloud-financial-report-44m-losses/

It would be sad to see Soundcloud close, but afaict they still give away most of their services for free so I can see how it would be difficult to make money that way

i hope they don't tank

an acquaintance of mine recently moved to berlin to work for them, hope he doesn't get canned. feel like they'll survive though

Yeah, I do wonder how SC makes money sometimes.

they charge you if you upload more than 3 tracks i think? i know bc i used to upload my radio sets to it and then switched to mixcloud when i hit the pay limit. otherwise no idea how they make money. ads?

They've never charged me.

3 hours actually

http://payments.help.soundcloud.com/customer/portal/articles/2159342-learn-about-our-pro-plans

While SoundCloud brought in €15.37m ($17.35m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980.

sweet raises

i wonder if they could be profitable at this point by having only subscription plans for uploaders (or lower the time limit for free plans), but be totally ad-free (and also stop dealing with the majors, so that people wouldn't have to worry about getting mixes taken down). that would be my ideal, but i know that a lot of people wouldn't feel the same way.

Yeah, just charge everyone a nominal fee to have a page.

an acquaintance of mine

is it the same acquaintance who's been posting about this story on twitter all afternoon?

It does seem like kind of an impossible business model for Soundcloud -- but I also wonder about Bandcamp, and frankly, I'd be MUCH more sorry to see that go, as it offers a real alternative to iTunes and physical media outlets as far as whole albums and getting to know a (new) artist's catalog.

There was a story earlier this year, or maybe late last year, about how streaming services were all essentially doomed, because it's too easy to stream for free via Youtube et al. I think Facebook was looking at starting their own streaming service, but only because they could see the writing on the wall, and thought it was better to get in now while some money was still available.

Bandcamp feels more a proper shop that happens to let you stream the music rather than a streaming platform (and I think there's now a limit to how many times you can stream an album, so it's clearly a check-out-then-buy kind of deal, they're not supposed to be as an alternative to youtube/spotify imo).

"feels more like"

Without giving anything away -- this is friend of a friend level stuff, I grant -- Bandcamp is not only doing just fine but thriving more than a lot of people may guess.